Euryphysics

A human of wacky and adventurous mind stares out into the cosmos (and in, out to the cosmos), doing his best to apprend its breadth and depth – paying attention to his everyday inner and outer worlds, but also to the world beyond --

Beyond what? Beyond the spacetime continuum. Beyond the ordinary waking state of consciousness. And of course -- beyond itself --

WARNING TO THE READER: This blog contains out-there, highly speculative and tentative brainstormy ideas. If you're looking for certainties or solid science, look elsewhere. I have chosen to share my early-stage brainstorms on certain themes here, to amuse and get feedback from those who like this sort of shit. If you don't, there is plenty of other stuff to read on the Internet!

I recall that my AGI thinking began as pretty much comparably wacky and speculative to this stuff, back when I was 16 years old or so in the early 1980s. Gradually it got more concrete and refined and practical. Whether these "euryphysics" ideas will analogously get more and more practical and useful and "real-world", time will tell (well at least, time will tell those aspects of our minds that are locked into the illusion of a time-axis ;D...)
In 2010 I began a blog called “A Cosmist Manifesto”, which later got polished a bit into a book (downloadable from the blog by now). My goal there was to explain certain aspects of transhumanist philosophy in a straightforward and elementary but no-holds-barred way.

Now I am taking the same strategy again, but with a quite different aim in mind. Again I am starting a special-purpose blog with an aim of eventually turning it into a book, but this time my goal is not popularization, but rather in-depth intellectual exploration. There is a body of fairly radical ideas I've been musing on for years, and slowly mentally preparing to write about. Finally I'm ready to start writing, now and then as a very-spare-time pursuit. Be aware that the earlier posts in this blog may get revised repeatedly as later posts get written; and that, assuming I do eventually create a book based on these posts, it might present things in a different order, etc. Basically I am blogging my preliminary-draft exposition of these ideas, as it's a straightforward way for me to gather feedback on the writing as it proceeds.

My topic here brings together several of my interests: the nature of mind, the foundations of physics, and the scientific foundation of psi phenomena and other anomalous phenomena such as instances of apparent survival after death and reincarnation. My aim to outline a different kind of model of the universe, one that is mostly consistent with physics and cognitive science as currently understood, yet also goes beyond these to embrace and at least partially explain other aspects of the cosmos.

To explain the funny/funky title: “Eury” is a Greek-based prefix for “wide” – so the “eurycosm” means the “wider world”, the whole cosmos including the physical and mental worlds as conventionally conceived, plus more. The Whole Wide World!

At first I thought to use the word “metacosm” instead, but the meaning of “outside or beyond the world” felt a little too strong to me. Yes, the eurycosm as I mean it is outside the spacetime continuum as we normally perceive and analyze it. But this doesn't place it “outside the cosmos” – it is part of the cosmos. The issue is just that the cosmos is wider, richer, more diversely structured than the parts of the cosmos that contemporary mainstream science generally acknowledges (or than most modern religions acknowledge, for that matter). I also thought of using “macrocosm”, but I felt it had too much flavor of “outer space” (quantum theory for the microcosm and astrophysics for the macrocosm, etc.). Here I want to go not just bigger but broader.

The investigation reported here is a cross-disciplinary pursuit. It has much of the attitude of science, yet explicitly goes beyond the bounds of scientific method as currently understood. One topic I aim to explore here is how the concept of “science” might be expanded to better encompass eurycosmic explorations. It also has much in common with philosophy; but I would rather this not be pigeonholed as a work of speculative metaphysics, even though on the surface it may look like that. My strong suspicion is that, in this case, what looks like metaphysics today, may in a few decades (or even less if we're lucky!) look like guidance for experiential/empirical explorations. In a late chapter here, I intend to share some thoughts about what such explorations might look like, extending my earlier ideas regarding “second person science.”

The grand-sounding title is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but not entirely; it is proposed with the attitude “Well, why not?” I have a great affection for the works of pre-20th-century philosophers and “natural philosophers”, especially those who were gutsy enough to propose big grandiose theories of Life, the Universe and Everything. I understand the value of modern-style hyperspecialization and in my own work on AI, robotics, biology and so forth I participate in highly specialized science and philosophy to a significant degree. Yet the old style of broad-ranging, integrative thinking does have its own unique pizazz, and at its best it adds a quite different sort of value.

Finally, a few words about feedback. I am quite interested in feedback on these ideas from anyone who takes this sort of pursuit seriously (or if you don't take these things seriously but your feedback is highly entertaining!). I'm not terribly interested in feedback from die-hard scientific-materialist ideologues; nor from dogmatic traditionally religious folks who are peeved that my concepts here don't more closely resemble the models outlined in their ancient holy books.

I have great respect for the practical and theoretical achievements of science; and for the profound insights and spiritual and human values resultant from the world's great religions. Nevertheless, just as Nietzsche viewed humanity as something to be overcome, I view both contemporary science and religion as thought/belief/interaction-complexes to be overcome. There's a wider world out there to understand and take part in. Let's try to understand it with minds as open as we can muster. The comprehension of broader eurycosmic patterns, within funky little corners of the cosmos like the one in which we find ourselves mostly resident, is itself a fascinating and probably important aspect of overall eurycosmic dynamics.

In this chapter I
will enumerate some core principles that I believe have value for
understanding the core nature of the cosmos we exist in. The
treatment will be abstract, somewhat sketchy and mostly rather dry.
Subsequent chapters will elaborate and extend various of these
points, in some cases in a more colorful and exciting way.

In this initial
chapter I have opted to sacrifice superficial excitingness for
simplicity and clarity, but make no mistake – on a conceptual level
this is rather bloody thrilling stuff! I mean – what is being
undertaken here is nothing less than a rational, formal model of the
broader universe, broad enough to encompass not only conventional
physics and psychology but also altered states of consciousness,
reincarnation, life after death, beings from other dimensions,
psychic phenomena and lots of other funky stuff human beings haven't
imagined yet! In this chapter it will all seem stiff and a bit
quasi-mathematical, but in subsequent chapters as the book unfolds,
we will explore more of the intuitive richness of the various
phenomena this framework is able to model.

Principle 0: In
dealing with subtle matters like the nature of mind and reality, it
is best to avoid absolutist attitudes, and to consider concepts and
entities as they appear in the perspective of some particular
observer or some particular class of observers.

This is both a
meta-principle for discussion and cognition, and a statement about
the nature of the universe. While this subjectivist/relativist
approach has a long history in philosophy, it has also arisen
recently within quantum physics, in the form of the “relational
interpretation” of quantum mechanics. In the relational
interpretation of QM, one can only only sensibly talk about the state
of some system after specifying the observer with respect to which
the state is considered as relative. This seems to me the best
approach to take, not only in the context of QM but more broadly.

As another
meta-principle too obvious to give a number, I would like to
emphasize that even though I have chosen the fancy word “principle”
in the enumeration of my core ideas here, I could just as well have
used “hypothesis” or “semi-educated guess.” I am probing
here into aspects of the universe that none of us humans, myself
included, really understand very well. This is all quite uncertain,
and I expect that in future once we (or our descendants or creations)
understand this stuff better, these writings will read like a messy
mix of insight and confusion. That's OK – it's great to see one's
ideas obsoleted via incorporation into a deeper understanding.

Without further ado,
then, here are some ideas I have come to suspect are key for
understanding the cosmos we live in. To some they will seem radical,
to others almost obvious (although oddly put).

Principle 1: The
physical spacetime continuum in which we perceive ourselves as
living, while in our normal waking state of consciousness, is best
viewed as a subset of a larger realm.

For lack of a better
name, I will call this larger realm “the eurycosm.” The use of
a singular “the” for “the eurycosm” is not intended to be
philosophically loaded; the eurycosm as I understand it has a great
deal of multiplicity to it, and could just as well be viewed as “the
field of eurycosms” or similar.

I tend to think of
the eurycosm as “the world beyond our physical universe.” On
the other hand, someone might claim that if the eurycosm has any
valid form of existence, it must be “physical.” To me this is an
uninteresting kind of semantic dickering. When I think about
eurycosm as “trans-physical”, what I mean is that:

there seems no
reason to assume that the eurycosm has a dimensional structure like
our physical reality does, nor to assume that it obeys basic tenets
like the conservation of energy (nor even that physical “energy”
is a useful concept in a eurycosmic context)

there seems no
reason to assume that the eurycosm has even the limited, approximate
variety of “objectivity” (observer-independence) that our
everyday physical world often appears to have

the extent to
which the eurycosm can be understood by methods of repeatable
experimentation and rational analysis is unclear

Of course, quantum
mechanics portrays the microworld as “trans-(everyday folk
physics)”; and other radical physics brainstorms like Wheeler's
pregeometry or even something as mainstream as string theory, also go
far beyond everyday physical reality. So it wouldn't be an insanely
large stretch to consider the eurycosm as I describe it here to be a
somewhat vaguely stated, a bit more out-there than usual speculative
physics theory. That is not, however, how I think about it.
Intuitively, I think of the eurycosm as being cognitive as much as
physical, but as significantly transcending the pattern-complexes we
normally associate with either cognitive or physical dynamics.
Thinking of eurycosmic structures and dynamics as a kind of extended
physics may be helpful for some purposes, but may also be misleading.

It is certainly
possible that eurycosmic modeling as I'm pursuing here may be useful
in the search for new “grand unified” physics theories. My
strong guess, however, is that even a much more refined version of
the eurycosmic model presented here will end up actually BEING a
grand unified physics theory in any currently recognized sense. I
think the eurycosm is just a fair bit slipperier than our physical
universe, and isn't going to be modelable with the precision and
completeness we want from a physics theory.

There seems more
potential in the exploration of models that live, in a sense, between
current physics and eurycosmic modeling. Could one replace string
theory, loop quantum gravity and so forth with some sort of
higher-dimensional physics theory that reflects key aspects of the
eurycosmic model presented here, but also gives rise to observed
physical data in a precisely calculable (whether analytically or via
simulation, or some combination thereof) way? I tend to think so,
and my speculations about causal webs could be interpreted along
these lines. But there is a lot of work to be done to turn those
speculations into something that could be tested against empirical
data or even used to do calculations (and I don't seem to be finding
time to do that particular work, given everything else on my plate).
Perhaps causal web theory will get fleshed out to fill the niche
between current physics and eurycosmic modeling, or perhaps something
new and different will emerge and play this role in a manner not now
envisioned.

Principle 2:
“Consciousness”, in the sense of raw awareness, is best
understood as a quality that can be an aspect of any entity in the
eurycosm.

This is a form of
“panpsychism” extending beyond our spacetime continuum into the
proposed broader realm. The word “consciousness” is
problematic, and some might want to call this kind of raw awareness
by the term “proto-consciousness” instead. The structured,
deliberatively self-aware consciousness of human minds has many
aspects that are not intrinsic to basic, raw consciousness.
However, I will use the word “consciousness” to include both
basic raw consciousness AND more complexly structured forms of
consciousness such as human consciousness.

Principle 3: The
eurycosm can usefully be viewed as displaying various forms of
mathematical structure, e.g. topology, geometry, order relations.

This is not to say
that such mathematical notions can fully capture or explain the
nature of the eurycosm. It doesn't seem logically impossible that
they can do so, but it also would seem folly to commit to such an
Principle at this time. In fact the nature of the eurycosm appears
sufficiently rich to elude any such complete capture, i.e.

Principle 4: With
respect to any mathematical, scientific, verbal or other model one
may construct, the eurycosm will always have some substantial
“remainder” that eludes this model.

The very likely
incomplete nature of any effort at modeling the eurycosm, however,
does not imply the futility of such initiatives. Rather, the
construction of mathematical, scientific and conceptual models is an
important strategy for coming to grips with the universe we live in
and navigating its mysteries.

Principle 5:
Entities within the eurycosm may sometimes be construed as existing
in a relationship of containment to each other. That is, we may
consider composite entities in the eurycosm, which contain other
entities within them.

Without getting all
formal about it, this means we can talk about sets and groupings of
entities in the eurycosm as being parts of the eurycosm themselves.

Next, we need to
start talking a bit about observations.

The notion of an
“observer” is subtle at the foundational level we are addressing
here, since observers themselves are generally best viewed as
complex dynamical systems – e.g. I, Ben Goertzel, am a different
observer right now (sitting in a taxi to the Shenzhen airport, a bit
blurry from an insufficient night's sleep, typing the first version
of this text) than I was ten seconds ago, 15 minutes ago (when I was
somewhat wrapped up with being annoyed at an intransigent Chinese
border control official), 2 hours ago (when I was peacefully sleeping
next to my wife), or 40 years ago (when I was more ambivalent between
a scientific materialist view and the kind of perspective presented
here).

In view of this sort
of complexity, it is better to start with observations and with the
simplest possible sorts of “observers”, and then build up to more
complex observers and types of observation.

Principle 6: An
“observation” can be understood as construing: some set of
entities in the eurycosm (being treated as the “observer”), and
some (possibly different) set of entities in the eurycosm (being
treated as the “observed”). An observation has a certain
directedness to it, which is implicit in the distinction between the
observer and the observed (which is a meaningful distinction even in
cases where the observer and the observed are the same set).

For some purposes we
can think of an observation as an “arrow.” Note also that the
“set of entities” referred to in Principle 6 could be a single
entity.

Like everything else
in the eurycosm, an observation has a certain aspect of consciousness
associated with it.

Observations thus
construed are about as “atomic” as one can get without tying
oneself in conceptual knots. They have a basic aspect not possessed
by “observers” like, say, “Ben Goertzel” or “the modern
scientific community” or a particular laboratory instrument as
considered over the lifespan of a complex experiment. Sometimes we
may also want to think about more complex sorts of observers. But
when things get confusing, it's often better to bring the discuss
back to the foundation of individual observations.

Still we have to
confront the complexity within observations:

Principle 7: Many
observations have hierarchical internal structure, in the sense that
they contain other observations.

That is: an “arrow”
of observation can contain multiple sub-arrows.

And we have to
confront the complexity of associating multiple observations with
larger entities:

Principle 8: A
“complex observer” O, like a person or machine or social group, is
a collection of entities S, together with a set of observations O1 in
which subsets of S serve as the “observer” portion

According to this
broad notion of a complex observer, pretty much any collection of
entities can be a complex observer. But in most cases, there is no
use to consider a random collection of stuff as a complex observer.
To distinguish the meaningful complex observers from the meaningless
ones, we need some notion of “coherence.” But to build up to
that we need some more preliminaries.

First we need to
associate some basic qualities with entities in the eurycosm:

Principle 9: From
the perspective of a given observer, within a given composite act of
observation, some entities in the eurycosm iare going to appear
“simpler” , more “surprising”, or more “intense” (i.e.
more the subject of focus) than others.

In mathematical
language, this implies that we can identify simplicity,
surprisingness and intensity as three different (observer-dependent)
partial orderings on the eurycosm.

The term “intensity”
is introduced here as a way of talking about attention. Intensity
is the degree to which something appears as the focus of attention
within a certain observation. Since intensity is a degree rather
than a binary variable, we can then think about “distributions of
intensity” across the elements of an observation.

One can also think
about the distribution of intensity across all the elements of all
the observations associated with a complex observer. Note that the
observations associated with a certain complex observer may form a
complex network of overlaps, and that for instance x might be more
intense than y within O1, whereas y might be more intense than x
within O2, even though both O1 and O2 exist within the same complex
observer. This is not necessarily problematic; the notion of a
complex observer does not imply any sort of logical consistency.
Although there are notions of coherence that are useful to consider
in the context of complex observers, which we will discuss below.

Principle 10: One
entity A can be thought of as a “representation” of another
entity B (from the view of complex observer O) if intensity of B
probabilistically implies intensity of A, across multiple
observations associated with O.

Basically, this
says: A represents B if when B is intense, A is also intense … at
least to some degree. This is a very primitive notion of
representation – basically just association. But it is proposed as
the foundation of more complex forms of representation, much as a
simple sort of observation is proposed as the founcation of more
complex observers.

Principle 11: P
is a pattern in S, from the perspective of O, if P represents S (to
O) and P is simpler than S (to O). That is, “a pattern is a
representation as something simpler.”

A pattern may be
associated with a quality of “notability”, basically gauging how
much simpler P is than S, and how strongly P represents S. This
quality has been called “pattern intensity” in some of my
previous writings, but here I am using “intensity” to mean
something else, so I'm introducing the term “notability.”

Notablity will often
lead to intensity, but this isn't exclusively the case.

Principle 12: The
surprisingness of an observation, is positively related to the
notability of the patterns contained with the observation.

I am not defining
surprisingness as some sort of formulaic combination of pattern
notabilities, because I think that experientially surprisingness and
notability are a little different. Maybe this is splitting hairs too
thinly, but I'm trying to be careful here.

Having built up our
model of the eurycosm to the point where we have a concept of
pattern, a lot of other concepts now come along for the ride. I have
put a lot of work into developing a theory of mind founded on the
concept of pattern. In my previous writings, e.g. “The HiddenPattern” (free PDF version here), we find concepts like mind, intelligence, emergence,
creativity and so forth conceptualized in terms of webs of pattern.
Some of the discussion there, if interpreted word for word, is
implicitly founded on materialist assumptions and doesn't port
immediately in exact detail to a eurycosmic context. However, the
core ideas given there are not tied to materialism at all, and can
all be ported to a eurycosmic context just fine, with just a little
bit of creativity.

For instance,
“emergence” is construed in pattern-theoretic terms as collective
pattern. A pattern P is emergent between S1 and S2, if it is a much
more notable pattern in the set {S1, S2} than in the individual
entities S1 and S2 considered separately. This concept can be
captured by some quite basic mathematics.

To appreciate the
sorts of issues involved with porting a pattern-theoretic concept
away from materialist assumptions, consider the concept of
intelligence. Among other aspects, it assumes a notion of time. But
in a eurycosmic perspective, one doesn't assume any particular time
axis as a foundation. Rather, one has to view intelligence as
existing relative to a certain bundle of local time axes (a concept
to be introduced just below).

So let us deal with
this little matter of time....

Principle 13:
When an observation contains two overlapping sub-observations, it is
sometimes the case that one of these is more surprising than the
other. This difference can be viewed as a kind of gradient of
surprisingness.

A surprisingness
gradient between sub-observations is a kind of “surprisingness
arrow”, different in nature from the “observation arrows”
introduced in Principle 6.

Principle 14:
Chaining together multiple surprisingness arrows, contained within
various acts of observation, results in what may be thought of as a
“local time axis”.

Given the
potentially complex internal structure of observations, sometimes one
local time axis may branch off into multiple axes, leading to a kind
of branching tree (or rather, directed acyclic graph) of local time
axes. A subset of such a branching dag may be considered as a
“local time bundle.”

Given a local time
bundle T, one can group elements of the observations related to T
into sets. For instance, my dog Pumpkin, as I conceive her, begins
as a large set of entities involved in a large set of different
observations made at different locations along a time axis or bundle
that exists relative to me as a complex observer. Pumpkin has a
certain coherence as a set of entities, which can be partially
captured by noting that there are many notable patterns in this set
of entities – these patterns comprise her “Pumpkin-ness” as a
set of regularities in my stream of observations.

So we can say:

Principle 15: A
persistent entity S, relative to a local time bundle T, may be
conceived as a set S of entities within observations associated with
T, so that there are highly notable patterns emergent in S

We can then look at
relationships of “elementary causality” between persistent
entities. A persistent entity, within each observation that it
intersects, is associated with a certain intensity distribution. One
can then ask: along the time-bundle T, is there a pattern that
changes in S1 tend to slightly precede changes in S2? Or vice versa?
If the former, we may say there is an elementary causal relation
between S1 and S2. We can draw a “pre-causal arrow” between S1
and S2.

Then we can ask --
from the perspective of the observer O, is there any other S so that
there is a pre-causal arrow from S1 to S, and another pre-causal
arrow from S2 to S? Can the pre-causal arros from S1 to S2 be
explained in terms of chains of pre-causal arrows leading from S1 to
S2 through other entities? If not, then from O's perspective, we
can draw a causal arrow (not just pre-causal) from S1 to S2.

A persistent entity
can be viewed as a series of time-chunked sub-entities. For
instance, if one chunks time by days, one obtains a Ben Goertzel on
23/03/16, a Ben Goertzel on 24/03/16, etc. One can create
time-chunked sub-entities based on eurycosmic time-bundles, and one
can draw causal arrows between these time-chunked sub-entities. In
doing so one gets an (observer-dependent, as always) causal web.

Principle 16: The
network of causal arrows between time-chunked sub-entities of
persistent entities, plays a significant role in the eurycosm. This
network is the elemental form underlying what we think of as “space”;
we may consider it as “proto-space” in the same sense that local
time-bundles are a kind of proto-time.

The physical space
modeled in current physics has a lot of structure beyond this kind of
network structure. But what is proposed is that this is the
essential structure underlying space: two time-chunked persistent
entities S1 and S2 are “adjacent to” each other in proto-space if
changes in S1 appear to cause changes in S2 directly, without
intervening factors. And proto-space consists of the network of
adjacencies between time-chunked persistent entities.

Principle 17: The
patterns that we observe in our physical spacetime-based reality,
correspond to analogout patterns in portions of the eurycosm outside
our physical spacetime. In these analogous patterns, we have local
time bundles in place of a physical time axis, and proto-space in
place of a physical dimensional space. Furthermore, there is a
correlation between The similarity between the patterns in our
spacetime and analogous patterns in other portions of the eurycosm,
is itself a significant pattern in the eurycosm.

With this Principle,
we have now gotten beyond abstract quasi-mathematical metaphysical
philosophy and started saying something concrete about the eurycosm.
Namely: the stuff we see around us in this world, is in some ways
reflected in other parts of the eurycosm.

But the dynamics of
the eurycosm are not restricted to the dynamics that physicists and
other scientists have identified in our physical universe. The
eurycosm seems to display other sorts of dynamics as welin l. A key
example, I suggest, is what Charles Peirce called “the tendency to
take habits” and Rupert Sheldrake has called “morphic resonance”:

Principle 18: A
characteristic of the eurycosm, or at least of large portions of the
eurycosm within which humans have tended to exist, is that
the distribution of pattern notability tends to be more peaked than one
would expect from naïve assumptions of probabilistic independence
among different entities. That is, once one observes a certain
pattern P in one part of a set S that is part of the eurycosm, this
surprisingly-much increases the probability of observing that pattern
P in some other part of S. Further, this phenomenon seems to occur
for sets S that are defined as spatiotemporal regions (though not
only for such sets S). Generally, one seems to have a certain set of
patterns that occur a bit more than one would expect, and the others
that occur less.

In the case of a set
S defined as a spatiotemporal region, this notability distribution
phenomenon takes the form of “morphic resonance” or “patterns
tending to continue.”

Due to this kind of
phenomenon, the impact of eurycosmic dynamics as perceived within the
spacetime continuum may appear to be “nonlocal” in nature. The
probability distribution of events at one spot in the spacetime
continuum, may appear correlatively or causally related with the
probability distribution of events at some far-distant spot in the
spacetime continuum. This may seem counterintuitive from
perspectives within the spacetime continuum, but yet within the
eurycosm the dynamic relationships in question may be direct and
straightforward. Pathways of eurycosmic causality may be quite
short, even if they connect events that are classified within the
spacetime continuum as occurring at very distant spots in spacetime.

Fairly similar logic
underlies various models of psi theory in terms of higher-dimensional
space, such as have been proposed since the middle of the last
century. Once one gets used to higher dimensional thinking, it's
easy to see how an ESP signal that appears in our spacetime continuum
as “spooky long range information transmission”, could be a short
hop through a higher-dimensional space. The eurycosmic model
proposed here, however, provisionally models the eurycosm as a
nondimensional space with a weaker sort of topology and geometry.

Of course, these
“containing eurycosmic space” ideas are still very general and
don't tell you much about exactly what kinds of phenomena we're going
to see in the context of ordinary human life. It is clear, however,
that they do open the door for classic psi phenomena such as ESP,
precognition and certain types of psychokinesis; and also for
variants of reincarnation, survival-after-death, and related
phenomena. What we have here is not a detailed explanation of these
“anomalous” phenomena – there is a long way from these ideas to
any sort of detailed explanation. What we have is something more
abstract but still, I think, at least somewhat worthwhile: a
rational, systematic model of the broader universe (the eurycosm) in
which phenomena like psi, survival and so forth can sensibly be
expected to exist. In later chapters we will explore eurycosmic
treatments of the specifics of various phenomena of this nature.

Getting back to the
specific proposal of peaked notability distributions: It's worth
noting that analogous peaked-distribution phenomena occur in human
brains. For instance, similarities as assessed in the brain often
get distorted this way – so that very similar entities get their
similarity boosted, and moderately similar entities get their
similarities decreased. In the brain this sort of phenomenon is
often a consequence of so-called “on-center, off-surround” neural
connectivity patterns – in which a neuron stimulates other neurons
near it, and inhibits other neurons far away from it. There is a
decent analogy between these neural-net phenomena and the much more
abstract setting we are considering here. But in fact one doesn't
need inhibition per se to get the needed dynamics – all one needs
is a preference for spreading attention to nearby entities, and a
fixed (or roughly fixed) amount of attention to go around.

Principle 19:
When a notable pattern has high intensity according to some observer,
it often occurs that other related notable patterns get high
intensity too – and to a higher degree than would be implied if
intensity were proportional to notability. This is one root of the
peaked notability distribution which leads to “morphic” type
dynamics.

Now we are getting
at the particular peculiarities of the interplay between our physical
universe and the enclosing eurycosm. The eurycosm has many dynamics
occurring within its shifting emerging timelines, but one of the more
significant ones is a morphic resonance type dynamics embodied in the
statistics of pattern notability. Our physical universe has its own
dynamics, embedded in but more specialized than the broader dynamics
of the eurycosm.

From a eurycosmic
point of view, our spacetime continuum and an individual human mind
are two examples of the same phenomenon: an autopoietic,
self-reinforcing, self-creating pattern system. That is: an
interlocking system of observations, each one involving an observer
within the system observing other observers within the system. The
peaked distribution of pattern notability encourages the emergence
and perpetuation of such systems.

Each autopoietic
pattern system has its own particular dynamics, and these can be more
significant in governing the evolution of a persistent entity within
the system, than broader eurycosmic dynamics. But still the broader
eurycosmic dynamics are there, ready to peek through and influence
things.

Principle 20:
When a phenomenon within an autopoietic pattern system is so complex
with respect to a certain persistent-entity observer that strongly
overlaps with that system, that the observer cannot possibly predict
it (consistent with the patterns that characterize the observer as a
persistent entity), then the outcomes regarding that phenomenon tend
to be biased via the distribution of pattern notability in the
eurycosm. In this way, the “morphic” distribution of eurycosmic
pattern notabilities manifests itself within the autopoietic pattern
system.

According to this
principle, for instance, the morphic dynamics of the eurycosm
generally stays out of the way of the different, more rigid dynamics
that characterize our ordinary spacetime (considering our spacetime
continuum as an example of an autopoietic pattern system existing
within the eurycosm). But when a phenomenon is simply too complex or
too well obscured to be observed by a certain complex observer, this
is where the broader dynamics of the eurycosm “leak through.”

Among the
complex systems to which these morphic dynamics apply are human
beings:

Principle 21.
Individual human minds existing in our spacetime continuum, have
analogues outside our physical universe in the eurycosm. The
dynamics of the eurycosm-analogue of a physical-universe human mind,
sometimes leaks into the physical universe and affects the dynamics
of the analogous human mind, or other associated human minds.

So in this
perspective, individual human minds – like you and me – are to be
viewed as having (metaphorically speaking) one food in this physical
spacetime continuum, and one foot elsewhere in the eurycosm. Since
raw consciousness is viewed as an ambient aspect of everything in the
eurycosm, this means that an individual human consciousness is partly
inside and partly outside our physical universe.

I have referred to
“mind” above but of course, there is no rigid boundary between
human mind and human body. From a physical spacetime perspective,
the mind of a system like a human being is effectively viewed as the
fuzzy set of patterns associated with that physical system, which
includes patterns at varying levels of abstraction.

Exactly which
patterns in our physical universe are reflected in the outside
eurycosm to which degrees, is not at all clear to me at this point in
time. We need a far better science (or trans-science of some sort)
of the eurycosm to explore and explain such things definitively. But
I will attempt to say some useful things on these topics in a later
chapter.

It is worth
reiterating the apparent relevance of morphic eurycosmic dynamics to
human cognitive dynamics:

Principle 22.
Human minds are often so complex with respect to themselves and each
other, that morphic dynamics from the eurycosm play a significant
role in guiding their dynamics, both within physical spacetime and
outside it.

Finally, while human minds are of particular interest to us, since we
are human, it doesn't follow that they are of especial importance in
the overall eurycosm:

Principle 23: It
seems there is a variety of different complex, self-organizing
systems – and a variety of different systems usefully conceivable
as “intelligent” – in the eurycosm. Some of these eurycosmic
minds appear to be quite broad and diffuse in nature, spanning much
larger regions of the eurycosm than something like an individual
human mind. There may even be comprehensive self-organizing,
autopoietic and “mind-like” dynamics across the eurycosm as a
whole, but this is difficult for us to firmly know given our limited
perspectives as humans.

Many individuals, in various “altered” states of consciousness,
have encountered non-human minds evidently resident in some region of
eurycosmic space. Many religious traditions posit the existence of
vastly transhuman eurycosmic minds, including in some cases minds
that span the entire eurycosm (a “Universal Mind”). My attitude
is that each such hypothesis must be considered on its own merits.
On the one hand, human individuals and groups are capable of all
manner of delusions; on the other hand, our ignorance as mere humans
is immense and the eurycosm is almost-doubtless brimming with all
sorts of complex systems we are unable to appreciate, and some that
we can just barely limn, or can perceive only in badly distorted ways
due to our own limitations.

Humanity's lack of a central and unique role in the eurycosm does not
imply that humans are irrelevant or useless in the grand eurycosmic
scheme of things. Just as humans rely on bacteria and various other
micro-organisms to survive and flourish, so may broader, in some
senses “greater” intelligences in the eurycosm rely on “simpler,”
more constrained beings like humans to nourish their own existence.
From a very high level view, one might view constrained structures
like our spacetime continuum (and the minds anchored therein, like
our own) as particular types of “pattern generation engines”
that, in addition to possessing their own intrinsic value, play a
role of ongoingly generating new patterns and casting them out into
the eurycosm, where they may combine with other patterns and play all
sorts of roles beyond human imagination. This tantalizing though
speculative theme will be taken up in a later chapter!

Before ranging too far afield into intriguing speculations, though,
it will be better if I now conclude this first chapter, which
contains my initial attempt to articulate some basic principles
describing the eurycosm in which our physical universe and individual
minds are embedded, and from which they have emerged.

I have presented these principles here without much justification,
but they were not pulled out of thin air (nor pulled directly out of
the eurycosm via “divine inspiration”!); they are grounded in a
variety of theories and observations in disciplines including
physics, parapsychology, biology, philosophy of mind, spiritual and
psychedelic studies, and others. In subsequent chapters I will dig
into some of these connections in more depth; in this chapter I have
opted for a simpler statement of basic ideas, just to give the lay of
the land.

As soon as one starts discussing wacky ideas like the possibility of "eurycosm" outside our spacetime continuum, natural question that arises is: How could these eurycosmic ideas be tested and evaluated?

I don't have an exact test designed yet, and indeed the ideas outlined here are so far a bit too slippery and vague to be rigorously tested. However, I do have a pretty clear idea what a test would look like.

Suppose we had a more precise version of the "euryphysics" sketched above. For instance, suppose we had quantitative versions of "the distribution of pattern notability tends to be more peaked than one
would expect from naïve assumptions of probabilistic independence among
different entities." (in Principle 18) and other similar assertions.

Then, we might be able to use these quantitative euryphysical principles to derive specific hypotheses about implications of euryphysics for observable phenomena in our spacetime continuum. For instance, we might be able to derive specific hypotheses about twin telepathy or remote viewing.

Empirical validation of such implications would provide validation of euryphysics as a physical theory vaguely analogous to, say, quantum mechanics string theory or loop quantum gravity. I.e. it would validate euryphysics as a model of a mathematical domain beyond our ordinary everyday reality, but with the property that ASSUMING the reality of this mathematical domain, makes successfully testable prediction about events in our spacetime continuum.

Consider an example: Suppose we figured out, using euryphysical principles combined with ordinary physics and neurophysiology, how to modify the brain of a human to enable them to more effectively "channel" individual human consciousnesses that are not associated with current physical bodies (i.e. to neuroengineer a better medium).

Then, suppose we used brain-computer interfacing to enable other people to wire their brains into the brains of this engineered uber-medium -- so they could feel what's going on in the medium's mind as the medium interacts with transcorporeal individuals.

Suppose that eurycosmic theory explained the significant aspects of the qualitative experience of the medium -- and that the observer (connected to the medium's brain) was able to directly experience that the medium's qualitative experience agreed with eurycosmic theory.

To the extent that these qualitative predictions involve experience of minds veering into and out of the spacetime continuum from the rest of the eurycosm, we would have validation of the interpretation of the eurycosm as an experiential domain exceeding the spacetime continuum.

"Second person science" plays a key role here, because it's the only way I currently see to
differentiate "euryphysics as a funky physics theory" (which would still
be cool if it were useful, obviously..) from "euryphysics as a new kind
of 'science' incorporating empiricism and experience."

Of course, a die-hard materialist could always argue that the medium is deluded about the causes of their experience, and the observer is just sharing the medium's delusion via the techno-magic of BCI. But I don't think we need to worry much about this -- after all, nothing can ever be demonstrated truly definitively. If the experience of contacting realms beyond the spacetime continuum is equally experientially vivid as the process of kicking a rock, and this experience is associated with equational models that make accurate predictions about empirical observations correlated with aspects of the experience -- then that's really as good as it gets.

Obviously it's a long way to making a demonstration like this in practice. My point, however, is to indicate that IN PRINCIPLE there are ways to test and validate euryphysical notions.

Note that quantum mechanics was quasi-validated via various "thought-experiments" for many decades before most of the classic quantum thought-experiments were actually executed empirically.

This post addresses a somewhat technical but quite critical point in eurycosm theory: how does the assumption of a peaked pattern-notability distribution lead to "morphic resonance"?

And also another poing: Where does this peaked distribution come from on the first place?

I refer to

Principle 18: A
characteristic of the eurycosm, or at least of large portions of the
eurycosm within which humans have tended to exist, is that
the distribution of pattern notability tends to be more peaked than one
would expect from naïve assumptions of probabilistic independence
among different entities. That is, once one observes a certain
pattern P in one part of a set S that is part of the eurycosm, this
surprisingly-much increases the probability of observing that pattern
P in some other part of S. Further, this phenomenon seems to occur
for sets S that are defined as spatiotemporal regions (though not
only for such sets S). Generally, one seems to have a certain set of
patterns that occur a bit more than one would expect, and the others
that occur less.

as given above...

So -- Given a universe with a bunch of patterns in it (or, to say it differently -- given a set of patterns that are considered to together comprise a "world"), we can look at the probability distribution of pattern-notabilities in this universe.

One approach would be to characterize the distribution of pattern-notabilities in a RANDOM universe, and then posit that the distribution of pattern-notabilities in the actual universe is different from that. Specifically, the hypothesis is that in the actual universe, the distribution is more concentrated on a relatively small number of patterns.

One problem with formalizing the above is that it's not so clear, in this very general setting, what comprises a "random universe."

An alternative approach is to think about random mutations to the world observed by some complex observer. Suppose we take the observation-set corresponding to a certain complex observer, and mutate it randomly a little bit. Then, if the hypothesis holds, this should generally result in an observation-set with a slightly flatter pattern-notability distribution.

What does it mean to "mutate an observation-set randomly a little bit"? Relative to an observer O, it means to replace the observation-set Obs1 with another observation-set Obs2 so that O will judge Obs1 and Obs2 to be similar. (If we want to really get relativistic we can posit a meta-observer O1 who is making inferences about O's similarity judgments about hypothetical worlds...) ....

For instance, one could form Obs2 by shuffling around the elements of the observations in Obs1 in minor but random ways. This is similar to "permutation analysis" in statistical validation.

So, OK, suppose we have an observation-set (aka world) that has peaked pattern-notability in this sense. How do we get morphic resonance type phenomena out of this?

Suppose pattern P has been observed somewhere in world W, by an observer O who has partial knowledge of W. Suppose O knows that W has a peaked notability distribution. Then the observation of P should increase the odds that O would give for P to be observed elsewhere in W.

Note that this kind of "morphic resonance" does not carry implications of causality. That is, we're not saying that (in any usual sense) the observation of P in one place CAUSES P to appear in some other place. Rather, we're saying that the observation of P in one place in a world, increases the odds that the world being observed is one where P occurs in another place.

For instance, consider two identical twins, T1 and T2. We can assume T1 and T2 have lots of common patterns in their minds. Let's call these common patterns P. Suppose some new pattern P1 arises in T1's mind. Suppose the new pattern M1 emerges from the combination of P1 and P. Then the peaked notability distribution means there will be a bias for M1 to occur elsewhere in the world. But this will imply there is a bias for some pattern P2 to occur in T2's mind, so that M1 can emerge from the combination of P2 and P. So twin telepathy, in a basic form, follows from the peaked-notability variant of morphic resonance.

Does this explain why twin telepathy occurs sometimes and not others? Not exactly. But we can grapple toward an explanation for this, perhaps. It's hypothesized above that pattern notability and attentional intensity tend to be correlated. If so then perhaps when P1 is more attentionally intense, M1 will end up being a more notable pattern. This in fact seems plausible -- a more attention-grabbing event will cause more significant patterns to emerge in a person's brain.

There is a long way from these general notions to a real theory of twin telepathy. But the direction seems plausible.But Where Does the Peaked Distribution Come From?

The next natural question is: Where does the peaked pattern-notability distribution come from? Why would the world have this property?

I don't have a very good answer for this at the moment, but will share some musings.

If one accepts the fundamental observer-dependence of the world, AND accepts that real observers are biased, then it seems a form of peaked notability distribution emerges naturally. But this obvious observation leads to some subtle considerations.

Most real-world observers are biased to perceive patterns that they already know, and bad at perceiving patterns that are new to them. Thus, if one is constructing a world or world-model based on the patterns perceived by some particular pattern-recognizing mind that has finite resources at its disposal, the odds seem high that this world or world-model will have a peaked notability distribution. Once it has recognized a pattern, the observer will be biased to recognizing that same pattern in other places, and will be less likely to observe other new patterns it doesn't know about (because recognizing new patterns takes more energetic/computational resources, which we are assuming to be limited).

On the other hand, if we consider this as an explanation for transparently morphic resonance ish phenomena like twin telepathy, we run into a funny conceptual problem.

We can't explain the morphic aspect of twin telepathy via bias in the twins' minds. If one twin breaks their leg and the other one gets a strong feeling something is wrong, this isn't because of a cognitive bias on the part of either twin.

But if we posit a limited-resources mind looking at a huge library of possible worlds, and choosing which ones to include in their short-list, it seems to be true that this mind is by default more likely to include worlds with peaked notability distribution -- because a mind with limited resources is going to be biased to recognize the patterns it already knows.

So the conclusion is that a peaked notability distribution could emerge from a lazy-minded God, in essence...? Or to put it less dramatically -- a finite-minded God. In this sense peaked notability distributions are highly compatible with some kind of Simulation Hypothesis.

From a world-engineering view, peaked notability distributions save computational/energetic resources (by re-using patterns over and over more often), and also provide worlds that encourage emergence of intelligence (because minds like to do induction, and these are worlds in which induction works). But this is a weak argument (at least without further supporting arguments), as there may be many other ways to create worlds that conserve computational/energetic resources.

An Anthropic Argument?

Alternately, one might think to make an anthropic argument. Intelligences are much more likely to exist in universes that support induction. Since we are intelligent, the odds are high that we live in a universe that supports induction. But then we have to argue that the most likely way to get a universe that supports induction, is to create a universe that has a peaked notability distribution generally. So this anthropic argument doesn't work that cleanly, so far as I can tell.

However, interesting tweak on the anthropic argument would go as follows:

Peaked notability distributions encourage kindness, because they increase empathy, by increasing the degree to which various minds are similar

Kindness encourages greater intelligence, because it allows social groups to become more cohesive, enabling collective cognition to work better

Thus, the observation that we are intelligent and highly empathic increases (anthropically) the odds that we live in a world with the kind of peaked notability distribution that increases similarity between minds

So then we can anthropically argue for both induction working surprisingly well, and for surprising similarity between different minds. The simplest way to get both of these surprising phenomena in a world may well be to give that world a generally peaked distribution of pattern notability.

Among the more perplexing phenomena that seem to require some sort of eurycosmic theory to adequately explain, are the various instances of apparent "reincarnation", "mediumistic channeling", and so forth.

The book Randi's Prize summarizes some of the evidence regarding possession and channeling in a compelling and readable way. Ian Stevenson's various books present the evidence for some sort of reincarnation-like phenomena in a thorough and detailed fashion.

Stephen Braude's excellent book Immortal Remains very carefully considers the question of whether these various phenomena are best explained in terms of some sort of "survival after death" of individual human minds, or else in terms of "super-psi" on the part of living humans in this world. For instance, a child who appears to be a reincarnation of someone who died previously, could actually be using psi powers to read the mind of the dead person (reaching back in time) and then embody what they read in that person's mind.

In the end Braude concludes that there is no way to thoroughly distinguish super-psi from survival, but that when one really looks at the data, one concludes that super-psi explanations get insanely complicated, whereas survival-based explanations are far more straightforward. Occam's Razor favors survival, in other words.

I agree with Braude's conclusion regarding the dichotomy of super-psi versus survival, but I think the dichotomy is a bit too narrowly posed.

Euryphysics gives a somewhat different perspective: all of our mind-patterns exist outside this spacetime continuum in the eurycosm. Saying that they "survive" the body's death is oddly imposing our time-axis on a domain where said time-axis is not critical and is just one pattern among many.

The mind-patterns comprising Ben Goertzel, existent in the eurycosm outside our spacetime continuum, may evolve along various other time axes, and may take part in various other complex dynamics. Other mind-patterns emerging within our spacetime continuum may then interact with these eurycosmic patterns and "bring them into the spacetime continuum" at places and times that seem bizarre from the view of our spacetime continuum, but make perfect sense in terms of the broader set of patterns comprising the eurycosm.

The logic of morphic resonance aka "peaked pattern notability distributions" or "tendency to take habits" is one framework for explaining why this sort of thing might happen.

We can say that some living person's spacetime-resident mind-patterns "morphically resonate" with a few of dead person's eurycosm-resident mind-patterns, and then the tendency to take habits (aka morphic resonance) means that MORE of this dead person's mind patterns tightly associate themselves with the living person's mind-patterns. This dynamic could then compound itself -- the more of the dead person's patterns are bound up with the living person's spacetime-resident patterns, the more the tendency to take habits causes more and more of the dead person's patterns to correlate themselves with the living person's spacetime-resident patterns. But of course this dynamic would be co-occurring with all sorts of other phenomena (including various psychodynamics in the living and dead person), causing an erratic and confusing phenomenon.

Of course, this very broad explanation does not explain any of the peculiar details of channeling, reincarnation, and so forth. It is very, very hand-wavy. It merely indicates a category of explanation that may be useful to consider.

Importantly, though, this is a category of explanation that is quite different from the more religious/superstitious categories of explanation frequently associated with this sort of phenomenon, and yet that does NOT attempt to wave away "survival" and replace it with super-psi.

One thing you have to wrap your brain around, to understand this stuff, is that eurycosmic "survival" is probably not a matter of the dead Ben Goertzel somehow "living on" in some alternate world similar to our spacetime continuum -- frolicking in fields up in the sky, or floating around with a bunch of angels among the clouds, etc. It's probably not a matter of another world parallel to ours but similar to ours, and flowing along a similar time axis. Most likely, it's rather a quite differently organized nexus of patterns, not structured around a linear time-axis like our world is, and interweaving human mind-patterns with a lot of other stuff.

When a living human's spacetime-resident mind-patterns resonate with a dead human's eurycosm-resident mind-patterns, what happens is complex and involves "on the fly" generation of a lot of new patterns. Just as human long-term memory is constructive (but maybe more so), the process of a living human mind in the spacetime continuum fishing a dead person's mind-patterns out of the eurycosm is quite constructive in nature -- the living person is building a self-organizing mind-system out of raw materials drawn from the eurycosm, together with raw materials from their own mind. The result may be quite complex and various in nature.

This sort of phenomenon may be even harder to quantitatively explain and analyze than more laboratory-friendly psi phenomena like telepathy or precogniion. But conceptually, it is quite plausible according to the eurycosmic perspective. And investigating such phenomena has potential to yield much more general insights into the nature of euryphysical dynamics (as well as to the nature of things in this little corner of the eurycosmos we call our spacetime continuum...).

I don't think quantum mechanics, in itself, is sufficient to explain the structure and dynamics of what I'm here calling the "Eurycosm."

However, I do think that QM has something to teach us about euryphysics -- possibly quite a lot.

One relevant issue is the need to apply quantum rather than classical logic in particular cases.When To Apply Quantum versus Classical Logic?

The story (based on various experiments, e.g. delayed choice double
slit, various quantum erasers and teleporters, etc. etc.) seems to be
that: If a certain event cannot in principle be measured, then it
needs to be modeled using quantum logic rather than classical logic.

However,
it isn't entirely clear how this should be formulated. If one accepts
the "relational interpretation" of QM thoroughly, then one may want to
say "If a certain event cannot in principle be measured by a certain
observer O, then it needs to be modeled using quantum rather than
classical logic, by observer O." (But, you ask, could the same event
then be modeled using classical logic, by another observer O1? Well in
the relational interpretation of QM, this possibility is not
well-formed, because one deals only with (event, observer) pairs, i.e.
all events are at foundation considered as observer-dependent. Of
course there may be various mappings between E and E1 with (E,O), (E1,
O1), so that one may have E and E1 that are very structurally similar
but with E quantum-modelable by E and E1 classical-modelable by O1....)

The
question then arises whether it makes sense for a Turing machine to be
"properly modelable only using quantum logic" by a certain observer. If
you buy the work of Dirk Aerts on quantum models of classical systems (search "Diederik Aerts" on arxiv for some of his relevant papers),
then the answer is yes. The "trick" is that one must assume certain
constraints on the observer.

I suspect that,
when all this is cashed out in detail, one will get the implication that: For a system with a
high degree of complexity and a limited amount of reflective capability, this system needs to model certain aspects of its own state in
terms of quantum logic. Regardless of the fact that from the
perspective of a hypothetical observer with full knowledge of all bits
in the system and the system's hardware underpinnings, the system should
be modelled classically.

Remember that in the relational view,
systems do not exist in themselves, only (system, observer) pairs. In
this view, there are no classical systems, only (system, observer) pairs
in which the sensible model of the system by the observer is
classical...

Note also the hypothesis in this paper
that an observer should be understood as a system identification algorithm, and quantified using algorithmic information (aka Kolmogorov information, aka the length of the shortest program for
producing the observer). E.g. this paper posits

System S is called quantum with respect to observer X if K(S) <K(X), meaning that X will be able to maintain a complete list of allits degrees of freedom. Otherwise X is called classical with respectto X.Quantum Logic for the Eurycosm?

Suppose we have a local time-bundle T, with which observer O intersects. Then we can ask whether: within time-bundle T, there are any observations in which observer O is observing event E.

If yes, then we can say that O can "in principle" observe E, relative to T.

One implication of quantum theory, then, is that in cases where O cannot in principle observe E, relative to T, the right way for the probability of E to be quantified (relative to observation by O) is using complex-number probabilities or quantum amplitudes.

On the other hand, if O can in principle observe E, relative to T, then the right way for the probability of E to be quantified (relative to observation by O) is using plain old real-number probabilities.

Note that from a eurycosmic perspective, this logic may be posited to hold regardless of the degree of intersection of E, O or T with our spacetime continuum.

Is this really the case? Does the logic of when to apply quantum vs. classical logic really apply in this out-there setting? I'm not sure. But it seems the best hypothesis to make at this point.

(As an aside, I have long wanted to find some excuse to introduce quaternionic or octonionic probabilities, extending the complex probabilities one finds in QM. But I haven't found a good reason yet...)

My friend and colleague David Hanson (best known for his robotics work) has posited the speculative but fascinating concept of "dark logic" -- analogous to "dark matter" or "dark energy".

Dark logic, as I understand his concept, refers to chains of inference that occur outside the scope of the world of ordinary physics and ordinary states of consciousness -- but that still have an impact on our everyday world.

We can think of human ideas as coming from multiple possible sources, including conscious ratiocination, social "global brain" dynamics, and unconscious creative dynamics resident in our brains. However, numerous people throughout history have emphatically pointed to an additional source -- which some call "divine inspiration", the Vedanta call the "Realm of Bliss", etc. (As Rimbaud said, the poet is the Thief of Fire...)

So dark logic, as I understand Hanson's conception, would be something like the actual logical operations underlying the operation of "the creative dynamic sometimes known as divine inspiration." But much as James Carpenter's "First Sight" views psi as a generally unrecognized part of everyday life (positing that e.g. humans and animals use weak precognition to help navigate our everyday lives on a routine basis), Hanson views dark logic as an everyday ingredient of our reasoning, thinking and intuiting.

Much like Carpenter's "first sight", in ordinary situations dark logic exists around the edges of other kinds of thinking and interacting, contributing bits and pieces here and there. And then in particular circumstances -- like Rimbaud's astounding poetic skinny-dips into the "other world," perhaps -- dark logic may become a dominant factor.

Conceptualizing Dark Logic in terms of Causal Arrows

Suppose we have an observer O1, and then another observer O. The observer O1 may note some phenomenon P that O cannot observe. In this case, P is "dark" to O (within the world of O1).

But what happens if P is part of a causal chain that begins and ends in O? That is, what if we have A and B that are not dark to O, and causal arrows of the form

A --> P --> B

that are observable by O1? Then we have an instance of dark logic, with respect to O's dynamics and O1's observation.

Where things get more interesting, from a human point of view, is where A and B are patterns in our spacetime continuum and P is outside our spacetime continuum (elsewhere in the eurycosm). This might be called "eurycosmic dark logic"...

What kinds of "logic operations" are typical of eurycosmic dark logic causal chains involving human minds? Good question! But I have a lot of more urgent stuff to do today, so I'll address this in a later post in the series....

In cases of dark logic based creative inspiration, like Rimbaud's poetry, what we have are (eurycosmic?) dark-logical leaps that are dark to Rimbaud's ordinary everyday self, his "ordinary waking consciousness" and his normal psychosocial self-model. But in the fire of inspiration, an expanded Rimbaud exists ("temporarily", we would say, relative to our spacetime continuum), and then certain causal chains emerge in the mind of this expanded Rimbaud -- they are not dark to him.

This is a eurycosmic model of "inspiration as a transcendent phenomenon." It is easiest to understand in the context of amazing feats of creative inspiration like A Season in Hell and Rimbaud's other great works. Yet the same phenomenon may exist in all sorts of everyday instances of inspiration, even a small child playing creative mind-games with a stick or a toy car.

Classical vs. Quantum Dark Logic?

In light of the ideas presented in the "Quantum Logic for the Eurycosm?" post, it seems that dark logic reasoning should be treated as quantum-logical from the perspective of the observer to whom it is dark.

To an outside meta-observer, like O1 in the above formulation, on the other hand, the reasoning that is dark to O is not dark at all -- and thus to O1, the dark logic reasoning should be classical.

(Side-note for the pedantic: In the eurycosmic view, as in the relational interpretation of QM, the (reasoning chain A-->P-->B cannot really be viewed as the same chain in both O and O1's world. But if we have "variants" of A-->P-->B in O and O1's world that are structurally analogous, it seems acceptable as an "abuse of notation" to consider them as both representing the equivalence class of events A-->P-->B. )